"This Advice Mr , Bush Shut The Hell Up"

Special Comment

By Keith Olbermann

Anchor, 'Countdown' - MSNBC

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

Transcript

President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and John McCain lurk.

Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States." This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.

The question was phrased as follows: "If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what's the worst that could happen, what's the doomsday scenario?"

The president replied: "Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it's bigger than Iraq, it's this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives."

Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.

Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? "This ideological struggle," Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country.

It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else's, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like "Patriot Act" is a brand name or "Protect America" is a brand name.

But wait, there's more: You also said "Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated." They made no "stand" in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!

As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of "they'll greet us as liberators." And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir.

Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!

***

It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him.

"Do you feel," asked an ordinary American, "that you were misled on Iraq?"

"I feel like — I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction," the president said. "You know, 'mislead' is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don't think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was."

Flawed.

You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.

You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, and fast.

You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how "intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment."

You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn't agree it was really chicken salad.

And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country's policy in lieu of, say, common sense.

The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.

You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as well claim was built from "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

***

Of course if there is one overriding theme to this president's administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question about this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted his excuse for war.

"And so you feel that you didn't have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?"

"No, no," replied the President. "I was told by people, that they had weapons of mass destruction …"

People? What people? The insane informant "Curveball?" The Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American snake-oil salesman Dick Cheney?

"I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

"And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes."

Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress's throat, the way you jammed it down the nation's throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate, you simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to "See, I done proved it" virtually written in the margins in crayon.

You defied patriotic Americans to say "The Emperor Has No Clothes," only with the stakes — as you and the mental dwarves in your employ put it — being a "mushroom cloud over an American city."

And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like North Carolina and Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight face, sir, that for members of Congress "the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes" — while you greet the political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your legacy — 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect — dead in Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, "I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction."

***

Then came Mr. Bush's final blow to our nation's solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.

"Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"

"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. "It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't even give up talking about Iraq, a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? In your own words  "solidarity as best as I can" is to stop a game? That is the "best" you can do?

Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not "Gulf" — golf.

And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the president's unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a ball with a stick, was not even his own damned idea.

"Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?"

"I remember when [diplomat Sergio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it any more to do."

Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn't even think of it yourself? The great Bushian sacrifice — an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives — and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?

If it's even true.

Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time — coincidence, no doubt — the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of golf was on Aug. 19, 2003.

Yet CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later.

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 1/2 years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next Jan. 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice:

When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this country back from the abyss you have placed us at ...

When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation …

When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead.

This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Local Nuke War Would Cause World Havoc
Category: News and Politics

Local Nuke War Would Cause World Havoc

5 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A regional nuclear war would not only be devastating to the countries involved, it would cause havoc worldwide for at least a decade, according to a new analysis.

The massive fires resulting from even a limited conflict would blast enough soot into the atmosphere to create an ozone hole over heavily populated areas, researchers warned in a paper in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A region of depleted ozone over the Antarctic, known as an ozone hole, has been a concern for years as it allows damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun to reach the Earth's surface. Some chemicals have been banned from use to help eliminate that hole.

Unlike the Antarctic, a nuclear-induced ozone hole would affect much of the world, causing damage to plants and animals and adding to skin cancer, eye damage and other effects in millions of people, according to researchers led by Michael J. Mills of the University of Colorado.

Mills' team used complex computer programs to model what would happen in the atmosphere in the event of a war between India and Pakistan in which each detonated 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosives.

They calculated that the blasts would send as much as five million metric tons of soot as high as 50 miles into the atmosphere.

The soot and the heat from solar radiation would cause a series of chemical reactions that would break down the stratospheric ozone layer that protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, they said.

"We would see a dramatic drop in ozone levels that would persist for many years," Mills said in a statement. "At mid-latitudes the ozone decrease would be up to 40 percent, which could have huge effects on human health and on terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems."

They calculated that a 40 percent ozone decrease would result in a 132 percent increase in light damage to plants and a 213 percent increase in DNA damage associated with skin cancer.

The mid-latitudes are the regions between the tropics and the arctic and are home to the largest numbers of people.

Does this sound like good strategy to you?
Category: News and Politics

Plane-Wreck..

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Pentagon has had a dirty little secret for years now: Foreign suppliers are an increasingly important part of the industrial base upon which the U.S. military relies for everything from key components of its weapon systems to the software that runs its logistics.  With the Air Force February 29 decision to turn over to a European-led consortium the manufacture and support of its tanker fleet - arguably one of the most important determinants of America’s ability to project power around the world - the folly of this self-inflicted vulnerability may finally get the attention it deserves from Congress and the public.

The implications of such dependencies were made clear back in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm.  In the course of that short but intense operation, American officials had to plead with the government of Japan to intervene with a Japanese manufacturer to obtain replacement parts for equipment then being used to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces
from Kuwait.

The obvious lesson of that experience seemingly has been lost on the Pentagon.  In the nearly two decades that have followed, it has sought to cut costs and acquisition timelines by increasingly utilizing commercial, off-the-shelf (or COTS) technology.  Under the logic of "globalization," COTS often means foreign-supplied, particularly with respect to advanced computer chips and other electronic gear.

Such a posture raises obvious questions about the availability of such equipment should the United States have to wage a war that is unpopular with the government or employees of the supplier.  Then there is the problem of built-in defects such as computer code "trap doors" that may not become obvious until the proverbial "balloon goes up" and disabling
of U.S. military capabilities becomes a strategic priority to foreign adversaries, or those sympathetic with them.

Even the Pentagon and intelligence community recognized that this sort of train-wreck was in prospect had Huawei, a company with longstanding ties to the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, been allowed to buy 3Com.  The latter’s "intrusion prevention" technology is widely used by the U.S. government to provide computer security in the face of relentless cyber attacks from, among others, Communist China.

Now, unfortunately, the Air Force has set in motion what might be called a "plane-wreck."  Opposition is intensifying on Capitol Hill, on the presidential hustings and across America to the service’s decision to make the European Aerospace, Defense and Space (EADS) consortium the principal supplier of its aerial refueling capabilities for the next fifty years.

There appear to be a number of questions about the process whereby the decision was made to reject the alternative offered by the Nation’s historic supplier of tanker aircraft - the Boeing Company. These questions (for example, concerning the ability to operate on relatively short and austere runways) seem likely to result in that corporation protesting the source-selection of a much larger Airbus aircraft over Boeing’s modified 767.

Even more telling, however, may be other considerations that argue powerfully against a reliance on the EADS-dominated offering. A number of these were identified in a paper issued by the Center for Security Policy in April 2007 and re-released last week, but were evidently not taken into account by the Air Force:

--One of the owners of EADS, the government of France, has long engaged in: corporate other acts of espionage against the U.S. and its companies; bribery and other corrupt practices; and diplomatic actions generally at cross-purposes with America’s national interests.

--The Russian state-owned Development Bank (Vneshtorgbank) is reportedly the largest non-European shareholder in EADS with at least a 5% stake.  It is hard to imagine that, at a moment when Vladimir Putin and his cronies are becoming ever more aggressive in their anti-Americanism and efforts to intimidate Europe, we could safely
entrust such vital national security capabilities as the manufacture and long-term support of our tanker fleet to a company in which the Kremlin is involved.

--The enormous U.S. taxpayer-financed cash infusion into EADS will probably not only translate into more money for the slush funds the company has historically used to bribe customers into buying Airbus planes rather than Boeing’s.  It will also help subsidize the Europeans’ space launch activities - again at the expense of American launch services.

--EADS has been at the forefront of European efforts to arm - over adamant U.S. objections - Communist China, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Iran.

--As the Center for Security Policy paper points out: "Through its aircraft production division, EADS is a huge jobs program for anti-American labor unions that form the backbones of some of Europe’s most powerful socialist parties. By purchasing products that employ these workers, we will be feeding those who would rather bite our hand than shake it."

These and other aspects of the selection of the Airbus tanker (notably, preposterous claims about the number of American jobs that will be created by contracting out our tanker fleet to the Europeans - see Michael Reilly’s essay at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org) seem to assure that this decision will indeed be a political plane-wreck.  The tragedy is that the replacement of our obsolescent aerial refueling fleet has already been unduly delayed.  The further deferral that now seems inevitable may mean that we wind up literally sacrificing aircraft and their crews, or
at least the national power-projection capability we need while this mess is sorted out.